Life & fun · December 15, 2025
Bithoven – A high-level, imperative language for Bitcoin Smart Contract
Hey HN! I’m a researcher working on Bitcoin smart contracts, and today I’m releasing Bithoven—a high-level imperative language that compiles to native Bitcoin Script (Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot). The Goal: Raw Bitcoin Script is notoriously difficult to reason about. Writing raw Bitcoin Script today feels like writing Assembly in the 1970s. You have to mentally juggle the stack (`OP_SWAP`, `OP_ROT`), manually manage distinct execution branches, and pray you didn't leave a stack item unconsumed (which crashes the script). My goal was to bridge the gap between complex contract logic and raw…
In plain words
Bithoven is a high-level imperative programming language that compiles to native Bitcoin Script for Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot implementations. It allows developers to write smart contracts using familiar syntax like if/else statements and return declarations rather than manually managing Bitcoin Script's stack operations. The language includes type safety features for booleans, signatures, strings, and numbers, designed to make Bitcoin smart contract development more accessible and less error-prone than writing raw opcodes.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN! I’m a researcher working on Bitcoin smart contracts, and today I’m releasing Bithoven—a high-level imperative language that compiles to native Bitcoin Script (Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot). The Goal: Raw Bitcoin Script is notoriously difficult to reason about. Writing raw Bitcoin Script today feels like writing Assembly in the 1970s. You have to mentally juggle the stack (`OP_SWAP`, `OP_ROT`), manually manage distinct execution branches, and pray you didn't leave a stack item unconsumed (which crashes the script). My goal was to bridge the gap between complex contract logic and raw opcodes, allowing developers to write readable, compile-time-safe code. Key Features: - Imperative Syntax: Write logic using familiar if/else and return statements instead of mental stack juggling. - Type Safety: First-class support for bool, signature, string, and number types to prevent runtime errors. - Targeted Compilation: Support for Legacy, SegWit, and Taproot compilation targets. - Native Primitives: Built-in keywords for timelocks (older, after) and cryptography (sha256, checksig). You can try it in the browser here (runs via WASM): https://bithoven-lang.github.io/bithoven/ide/ Here is an example of a Hashed Time-Locked Contract (HTLC): (condition: bool, sig_alice: signature) (condition: bool, preimage: string, sig_bob: signature) { if condition { // Relative locktime (Sequence) older 1000; return checksig (sig_alice, alice_pk); } else { // Hashlock verification verify sha256 sha256 preimage == hash; return checksig (sig_bob, bob_pk); } } The project is free open source and the academic paper is currently under review. I’d love to hear any feedback. Thanks for checking it out!
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